WND EXCLUSIVE

Strategy targets real war against women

Body count in millions as scriptural idea of life abandoned

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

Democrat allegations of a GOP “war against women” have filled the news in recent weeks, and the incendiary phrase is frequently revived as a weapon for opposing proposals as ordinary as having women pay for their own birth control or not billing taxpayers for their abortions.

But calling all that a “war on women” is just election-year politics – while the real war on women posts a body count in the millions annually, and there appears to be no real attempt to slow it down.

Except for the Pink Pagoda Girls and anyone who wishes to join the campaign in its first goal: To raise $1 billion over the next 10 years, which could save the lives of a million baby girls.

The problem isn’t complicated. In China, where the communist government notoriously enforces a one-child-per-couple limit, there also is the strong preference for a male heir who will carry on the family name and care for his parents in their senior years.

The result is a massive wave of decisions to “set aside” newborn girls.

The program was launched by Dr. Jim Garrow, whose considerable personal expenditures over recent years (think tens of millions of dollars) already are credited with saving some 45,000 infant girls who otherwise would have been discarded in China. The girls have been delivered to adoptive couples anxiously waiting to be parents.

Garrow was executive director of the Bethune Institute’s popular Pink Pagoda schools in China. He ran private, English-only institutions for the children of Chinese elite – an effort that eventually expanded to some 160 schools. The aim was was to prepare the students for entry into top universities around the globe.

But one day in 2000, Garrow found his assistant weeping. The woman explained her sister’s husband was insisting the couple’s newborn daughter be smothered to make way for a son, because of China’s one-child policy.

Garrow’s personal connections and funds made it possible for the infant to be placed with an adoptive couple.

He told WND the horror of the situation is that women’s lives are so devalued in the Chinese culture, and an even greater tragedy is that Americans know little and probably care little about it.

But he said such an evil perpetrated on one side of the earth undoubtedly will infect other parts, too.

“The majority of people don’t realize that what the Chinese are doing in forcing abortions, sterilizations and infanticide has a cascading effect on the rest of the world.”

He said it’s spreading because of weak world leaders, but the result clearly is the most aggressive “war on women” he’s ever seen.

He cited a recent report in the Journal of Medical Ethics that suggested parents should be allowed to kill children up to about age 2, because “both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life.’”

That attitude, added to the wide acceptance of abortion, furthers the “war on women,” he said.

“We have become anesthetized to the notion of murder and so cowed into not responding to women’s rights issues that we can’t even stand up when it’s clearly murder,” he told WND.

He said the slippery slope starts when people abandon the Bible’s standards.

“The same moral base that allowed abortion eventually leads to euthanasia, infanticide and eugenics,” he warned.

He said the goal of raising a billion dollars over 10 years to save the lives of baby girls in China certainly is reasonable.

The campaign’s website cites Matthew 7:7 from the Bible: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

Joseph Farah, founder and CEO of WND.com and WND Books, said the company will support the program in a number of ways.

“We’re very excited about participating in a program that can save lives – specifically young, innocent female, Chinese lives targeted by the horrendous cultural pressure favoring boys and tyrannical, immoral government pressure of the one-child, population-control policy,” said Farah. “That Jim Garrow has found a way to do this – one that has been effective on a mass scale already – is truly a miraculous opportunity for all who consider human life a gift from God. There are many needs in this world. There are many great causes. But knowing that we can save a human life for just $1,000 places this need and this cause right at the top of the list.”

Erik Rush used a recent column to address the effort.

“There are several reasons I chose to ally myself with The Pink Pagoda, one of which is that in so doing, I will be more readily able to call Americans’ attention to the sort of public policy toward which we ourselves are heading,” he wrote.

“The People’s Republic of China is, of course, a communist country; inasmuch as I have dubbed liberalism ‘communism on the installment plan,’ there are noteworthy parallels that exist between the policies of a full-blown communist regime and those toward which America is gravitating.”

He noted the “culture of death,” so well-established in China, which now has made inroads into the United States.

“As many have pointed out, places where rabid secular humanist policies have taken hold are usually the first to begin touting the ‘moral high ground’ of legalizing euthanasia and practicing eugenics. Abortion, which was sold in the U.S. as being necessary as long as it was used in only the most extreme circumstances, has become an industry as well as an abomination, and it is clear that its original rationale was pretextual,” he wrote.

A move in the U.S. House to ban the practice of basing abortions on the sex of the unborn just last week was defeated by Democrats.

For his efforts in “human trafficking,” Garrow was nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, which eventually was won by Barack Obama.

And how big is the 1 million lives goal? It addresses only part of the need.

“The estimates range from 5 to 8 million young girls murdered annually, and those estimates do not include sex selected abortions,” he explains. “The Economist published the incredible numbers that the now-skewed population figures show us. Where a 104 to 100 ratio (males to females) would be normal, Chinese numbers are now more on the order of 126 to 100. This is an incredible imbalance and quite unnatural. The societal consequences are dramatic and long-term.”